Recipe for Christmas Bread with cranberries

This is a really festive bread. It’s tasty, and looks merry with the little red berries. I like eating it with blue cheese, but with just butter it already is a treat. This recipe is inspired by the dried cranberries that are suddenly appearing in stores in November. And I love maple syrup, especially in combination with walnuts. Of course, you can use pecan nuts instead of walnuts. But walnut oil is difficult to replace, it seems pecan oil is made flavourless.
Other bread recipes: Roman bread, Medieval bread.
For a large bread of 2 pounds; preparation in advance 90 minutes; preparation 50 minutes.

250 gr (2 cups) flour
250 gr (2 cups) wholemeal/whole wheat
3¼ dl (11 fl.oz) buttermilk
3 Tbsp walnut oil
3 Tbsp maple syrup
1 tsp salt
7 gr (1 tsp) dry yeast
75 gr (1/2 cup) walnuts, coarsely chopped
75 gr (⅔ cup) dried cranberries

Preparation in advance

Mix flour, whole wheat meal, yeast and salt. Add buttermilk, oil and syrup. Knead until you:ve got a supple, elastic bread dough. Then add walnuts and cranberries. Let dough rise for thirty minutes, knead through once more and give the bread any shape you want. Let it rise for another half hour.

Preparation

This bread can be baked in a mould or on a baking tin. The dough can also be divided into small breads. The bread can be decorated with walnuts and guilded with egg yolk, egg or milk.
Preheat the oven to 200 °C/390 °F. Bake the bread in the middle of the oven. Small breads are done in twenty minutes, a large bread needs about fifty minutes. Tap the bread with a wooden spoon. If it sounds hollow, the bread is done.

To serve

With a brunch, sprinkled with icing sugar. Or with the cheese after a meal (but without the icing sugar).
The bread on the picture is baked in a christmas tree mould. The fresh cranberries were fixed with little wooden pins after baking, but a little sugar glazing would be better.

Simple snack

Walnuts or pecan nuts with a little maple syrup.

Ingredients

All descriptions of ingredients

Maple syrup

This is the concentrated juice of the North-American sugar maple tree (Acer saccharum) or the black maple tree (Acer nigrum). The taste of real, pure maple syrup is more complex and interesting than that of fully refined sugar. But pure maple syrup is expensive, so there are many adulterated versions.

Cranberries

These berries (Vaccinium macrocarpon) are indigenous to North-America. In the Netherlands they grow in the wild on the island Terschelling, where a barrel with cranberries washed to shore after a shipwreck in 1840. The original European equivalent of cranberries are now known as small cranberries, swamp cranberries or bog cranberries, in Dutch these are called ‘veenbessen’.